Google ranking factors in 2019 which every blog should follow.

In this article, I will show you a list of 2019 Google ranking factors which influence the current rankings and what is essential to follow if you want to get more significant amount of search traffic to your blog.

Site Level Ranking Factors

1. Content should have value.

In Search Console Help Google it’s explained that they are against thin affiliate sites and are ready to penalize websites which don’t give unique content to their visitors or have too many affiliate links in their posts.

2. Create the “Contact us” page.

Google has written that they will give preference to sites with “appropriate amount of contact information.” So, create – contact us page, and include as much contact information as possible, don’t forget to include links to your social network accounts too.

3. Your site’s Trust Ranking (TF)

Trust Rank is a ranking factor measured by MOZ. Many well-known SEO experts believe that this is one of the most important ranking factors. Google doesn’t point directly to MOZ, but they have said “Search result ranking based on trust” in their guidelines.

4. Use proper site architecture.

Well-made site architecture will help search engine bots to find and index all your content. Site architecture with a too deep pyramidal system (or with broken internal links) will leave part of your page aside without indexing.

5. Update your site regularly.

When you update your post or publish new content, your site normally pings search engines bots and lets them know you have updated your content. Regular updates in your site will help your website to have higher indexing frequency in bot eyes so that they will come more often, and so you will also gain priority to your site.

6. Make your website Sitemap

A sitemap helps search engine bot to discover where all your content is located in your site. You should create a sitemap and upload it to Google Search console or Bing Webmaster tools. If you use WordPress there are plenty plugins that will create and update sitemap for you, but if you use the self-made site, you will need to use any of the free sitemap creator tools over the internet, you can simply Google them.

7. Keep your website up and working.

If you experience plenty of moments where your site is down, you might get de-indexed from search engines. Even short periods for two days or more can cause loss of your rankings if search engines bot will try to visit your page in this time.

8. Base your server close to your audience location.

Your server location has a big impact on your site speed for a current visitor. If your audience is in the USA for example, but your server stays in Europe, users will expect slower site speed. This is especially important to geo-targeted sites.

Luckily there is a brilliant solution called CDN that can solve your problem with ease. CDN is a particular service that will cache your page, send copies to their servers around the world and will deliver your site to visit not from your original server, but from the closest available CDN server.

9. Site Security Certificate (SSL)

SSL certificate is a very important factor in Google eyes and Google has officially confirmed that having https is a ranking factor.

10. Create Privacy Policy and Teams of Service pages.

Google looks to Privacy Policy and Teams of Service pages as an additional factor that confirm that your site is legal and it deserves trust.

11. Avoid duplicating meta information.

Search engines at the first look compare your sites by reading meta descriptions, page titles and meta keywords. If they are the same for two different pages, in Google eyes it seems you have a duplicated content and most likely Google will index only one page and will leave all other pages with the same metadata unindexed.

12. Use proper Breadcrumb Navigation

Google has written: “Google Search uses breadcrumb markup in the body of a web page to categorize the information from the page in search results.”. So keep in mind to keep it simple. User-friendly page architecture is recommended.

13. Optimize your site for mobile devices.

Nowadays more than 50% of all searches have been done from mobile devices. In that case, Google now penalizes sites that are not mobile friendly.

14. Have a user-friendly site.

Search engines try to make their bots act more and more as regular visitors does. In that fact making site user-friendly is a good idea not only to give a better experience to your visitors but also to look better in search engines eyes.

15. Build the reputation of your site.

Site reputation is very important. Search engines can try to check if your site has customer reviews or testimonials and decide then if you can have another point for shoving the value of your site to visitors.

Domain Level Ranking Factors

16. Domain age factor

There isn’t too much you can do with that, but domain age matters. The older your domain will be the better it will rank.

17. Relevant keyword in the top level domain

It is a good idea to think about your blog main keyword before you have gone to register a domain. You can read more about it in my previous post “how to register the right domain for your blog.”

18. Start your Domain with the main keyword.

Well it is a proven that domain which starts with the main keyword , have far more benefits comparing with domains where keyword isn’t the first word. For example for my main keyword “webmaster”, domain webmastereasy.com will have bigger potential then domain easywebmaster.com.

19. Domain length factor

Short domains rank better. I know one-word domains nearly aren’t possible to get anymore especially on .com TLD, but try to find right two words domain and try avoiding three or more words in a domain name.

20. Domain name history factor

If you bought a domain which was previously penalized, you are risking to take Google penalties over you. Also, domains that have been dropped multiple times in Google eyes seems potentially untrustful.

21. TLD extension factor

Country-based TLD like co.uk or .fr will help you to rank better traffic in a particular country, but you will rank poorly in whole other countries. Also by using extension .de for a page to be ranked in Russia for example, will look suspicious in Google eyes.

Page level ranking factors

22. You should include keywords in the title of the article.

Well, Google has decreased the importance of this ranking factor, but the keywords in the title of the article continue sending a strong signal to the search engine what this article is all about.

23. Your article should start with the main keyword.

If we follow MOZ recommendations, they suggest starting the title with the main keyword, and declaring by their statistic – it has an impact on the ranking of the article.

24. Include the main keyword in your post description.

Google doesn’t use post description as a ranking factor, but it shows the first part of it in search results, and the first sentence can increase “click through rate” for your post.

25. Your primary keyword should appear in H1 or H2 tags.

Google use H1, H2 and even H3 tags as an additional ranking factor to decide what particular article is all about. So it is a great idea to include your main keyword into H1 or H2 tag as well as adding it into the title tag.

26. Try writing longer posts when possible.

Content length isn’t a direct ranking factor, but the search engines see longer posts as potentially better only because they describe the topic more in detail. Many SEO experts suggest keeping posts longer than 1000 words, and some even recommend going with 2000 words or more when possible.

27. Include a table of content.

If you include a table of contents, it will help search engines bots index each part of your post better and can result with better rankings.

28. Keyword destiny factor.

Keyword destiny used to be an essential factor in the past and Google is still looking into it, but you need to be careful with it now because Google penalizes sites with abnormal use of the same keywords in an article.

29. Page loading speed.

Search engines can quickly determine your sites speed.

It is proven that all search engines use page speed as a ranking factor.

30. Page loading speed in Chrome browser

31. Avoid duplicate content.

Duplicated content can hurt your sites rankings badly, so better make sure you don’t have any duplicated content in your website.

32. Your images should be optimized.

Google uses images weight, title and alt tags as ranking signals too.

33. Update your content.

Google uses the same type of fresh content factor, even when you update your old post, in Google eyes due to revision data it comes fresh and it can give some ranking boost to it.

34. External links are ranking factor.

Search Engines Journal have written case study where they claim that linking out to high authority sites also have a positive impact on your site rankings.

35. Use proper grammar in your content.

These days when quality becomes most important, proper grammar gives a strong signal of your content quality.

36. Have a mobile-friendly site.

Google uses their “mobile first” policy, which means they will prioritize sites that are mobile friendly and have proper mobile-friendly navigation for different mobile devices from tablets to phones.

37. Amount of outbound links from your website.

Too many do follow links from your site can hurt your page authority, so the good practice is to use a mix of do follow links and no follow links not only for your incoming links portfolio but also for links from your site.

38. Broken links factor.

Many broken links in your site gives Google the idea, that your website isn’t well maintained and probably outdated, so I would suggest monitoring your links regularly and changing every broken link with working one.

39. Internal links ranking factor.

The more internal links pointing to your page the more relevant your content looks in Google eyes. Google also measures the quality of pages linking to you. The pages with higher authority have a more significant impact on your results competed with low authority sites.

40. Domain authority factor (DA)

41. Page URL path factor.

In fact pages that are closer to home page rank better comparing with pages that are far away from the home page. In that case, it is essential to build low-level site architecture with no more than 3-4 levels in depth.

42. Multiple keyword ranking factor.

If your page ranks for more than one keyword in Google, it becomes an additional signal that your page has quality content and that boosts its value.

Backlink related ranking factors.

43. Linking domains amount ranking factor.

Following the Google algorithm, one of the most important ranking factors depend on the number of domains linked to your site. Just bear in mind, your link portfolio should be built slowly and from relevant websites. For example, if your blog is about recipes and you will have a lot of backlinks from sites about car repair, Google can take it as a sight that your link portfolio isn’t natural, and they can even penalize your site as they might think you’re buying links, which is against Google TOS.

44. Linking domains which age factor.

Obviously, linking domains which have aged has greater impact comparing with new ones. New domains commonly have lover domain authority, what will have an impact on your domain authority as well.

45. Try getting backlinks from domains that are related to different IP classes.

Backlinks from sites which are in the same IP C-class have less power comparing to links from different classes.

46. Keyword in the backlink anchor text.

The keywords in links which are found in anchor text, still have an impact of sites rankings. Jet you should use different anchor texts (as much as possible) as over-optimized anchor texts can cause penalization from Google.

47. Alt text ranking factor for post images.

The Alt text for images works the same way as anchor text for links, and you should always remember to put relevant alt text attribute to images in your site.

48. Linking domain authority (DA) factor.

The domain authority of the linking domain has a very strong impact not only on your page ranks but can improve your domain authority as well.

49. Links from the same domain as your competitors.

If you can get a backlink from the same domain, your competitor has a link from, it can become a strong link relevancy factor.

50. Backlinks from guest posts.

Backlinks from guests’ posts in high authority pages also bring value to your ranking. But, like many other SEO technologies these days, if you’re getting too many backlinks from guest posts it could hurt your site rankings too.

51. No- follow link ranking factor.

Google use to say that they don’t follow no-follow links. But having part of no-follow links in your portfolio still shows Google that your link portfolio is natural.

52. Link diversity factor.

Having too big percentage of one type of links only, for example, signature links, guest post links, comment links and so on are sign that you use spammy technologies to build your webpage link portfolio.

You should build your link portfolio with diversity in the mind, using different technologies, different link sources and getting both dofollow and nofollow links to get your page ranked high.

52. Contextual links ranking factor.

The links included in page text have much more value comparing to links at the end of the article or stand-alone links.

53. Using relevant anchor text in your site internal links.

You should use relevant anchor texts in your site internal links too, because internal linking becomes much more important in SEO and the keywords you find in internal links, which are part of anchor text are signalizing about the page content, where the link is pointing to.

54. Country-based TDL factor.

Getting links from a certain country can help you rank better into a particular country. For example, backlinks from domains co.uk can help you rank better in United Kingdom.

55. Backlink age factor.

Aged backlinks give more power compared to newly created links.

56. Links from 301 redirects.

Direct links that lead to your site, of course, has bigger impact, but 301 redirects from different domain still give you some boost on ranking too.

57. Word count in an article from where the link is coming.

Content amount into linking page have almost the same rules as your page content size. So if your link comes from article with 2000 words it will be more powerful comparing with a link coming from 500 words article.

58. Content quality in linking page.

The same comes with the quality of the page where the link comes from. Links from quality written articles have more value compared with a link from a poorly written article with a lot of spelling mistakes.

59. Direct traffic factor.

As I have written before Google collects data through their-owned Chrome browser, and if the site has a lot of direct traffic, it’s a signal that the people who visit the page are interested in the content of the site and this is helping to rank the page higher.

60. Returning customers ranking factor.

Pages with a high amount of returning visitors will have a ranking boost.

61. Amount of comments.

The amount of comments in your site is showing Google how active the community around your site is. Large numbers of comments can give a strong boost to your rankings.

62. The time the visitor spends on your page.

Google measures the time your visitors spend on your page through Google analytic or Chrome browser. Larger average time gives your site a ranking boost comparing.